Also along these lines, I asked one of the great mentors of all time, Irv Weissman, about his early career and who were the mentors that made the difference to him.

Irv was kind enough to take time out of his schedule to answer me.

I found his response quite intriguing.

Thanks, Irv, for sharing this autobiographical piece!

Here is what I wrote to Irv:

Dear Irv,

I am writing a piece for my blog about mentoring and when I think about mentoring, you come to mind as someone who has mentored an astounding array of great scientists.
I wanted to make the point in part of my piece that great mentors were of course relatively new scientists at some point in their careers and they had mentors of their own that were important.
I wanted to ask you– who were the most important and influential mentors in your career?
How did they help you evolve as a scientist?
Any other thoughts or advice about mentoring?
Thanks!
Paul

And here is what he said in response:

What was amazingly lucky for me is that I had role models, but in fact no one overseeing my research after high school. I began research as a junior in high school with a pathologist who was tired of academia and moved to run a path lab practice at Montana Deaconess Hospital in Great Falls Montana. His name was Ernst Eichwald, and he had just discovered the HY antigen by showing in an inbred strain of mice [C57BL] that females always rejected male skin. By telling me that in an inbred strain of mice 25% of skin grafts were rejected, and that it was genetic, he allowed me to ‘rediscover’ the finding. I began with him to see if the HY was on all normal and cancer cells from males [it was], but on my own I wondered if transplantation tolerance could be induced to this antigen, much like Billingham, Brent and Medawar had just shown [1953,1956]; whether the HY was the same in all mouse strains; and why did some strains not reject male skin grafts? By the end of my senior year in high school I was mainly doing my own project. I continued in summers during my 3 years of college. By then I had published with EE that the unresponsive strains lacked immune reactivity genes [1957], that by grafting F1 males of reciprocal parentage crosses the HY was the same in all strains[1959], and [unpublished] that unresponsiveness was not caused by sharing a gestation with male fetuses [remembering ray owen and the freemartin cattle experiments]. When I entered Stanford Med School, I met Henry Kaplan who was a remarkable man; he was chief of all Radiology, had published on leading edge papers in immunology, leukemia, radiation targets, and even the primary establishment of high dose linear accelerators to deliver radiotherapy for cancers inside the body instead of in the skin. He had also just made Hodgkin’s Disease an 85% curable disease instead of 0%, and had even written a diagnostic radiology of the heart text. He gave me a lab, a part time technician, and allowed me to recruit other med students into the lab. We all had entered Stanford MD when it was 5 years required, spacing the first years of basic science over 3 years instead of 2, creating a half day every day for those 3 years plus summers to do research of our choosing. I chose to continue my exploration of immune tolerance to try to understand the development of the immune system, including the role of the thymus. I also set up a personal tutorial with Kaplan where I took his lab notebooks and reconstructed his mouse discoveries, meeting with him every other week or so to discuss the old experiments. I also read every paper he wrote. Those experiences taught me what it took to translate discoveries into potential therapies. Kaplan also sponsored me to spend the 4th’5th year 9 month interval with Gowans in Oxford, where I developed intrathymic and intra bone marrow radioactive nucleoside labeling of cells to determine their lineage potential and migration potential. Gowans left on sabbatical when I was 3 months into it, but I used the time to do research, and again, to read every paper he wrote. When I returned to finish Med School [1965 MD], I decided to keep doing research, and again Kaplan kept open a lab for me until I became an assistant professor in late 1968/early 1969. I will attach much of my remembrance of those days in a few articles I have written, but what should be obvious is that I had fantastic role models, but none of them oversaw much of my research. So I was free to learn the problems and possibilities of discovery on my own. The experiments on immune tolerance led to the lineage tracing technique I developed and from their to the bone marrow origins of all immune cells, and from there to stem cells.

To me several things stand out in what Irv wrote. First, Irv had at a very unusually early age an extraordinary passion for science, an extraordinary ability to process information on a very high level, and great vision for how to test ideas. These are things that no one, not even the best mentor in the world, can teach someone.

I would call it the “right stuff” for science and Irv sure has it. Note that Irv was born on October 21, 1939 so literally as a teenager (age 19) he already was publishing great science.

Also it nonetheless is clear that mentors and role models such as Eichwald and Kaplan made a big difference for Irv as a young scientist, and I find it so admirable that Irv continues that tradition of mentoring and being a role model to many great young scientists.

Perhaps I should not be surprised, but Irv was also kind enough to include a bibliography (below) as well!

Many of the important papers . The review types are easiest to chart the course. Missing is this week’s paper on the 14 year followup on the breast cancer HSC rescue paper in Biol Blood BM Trans with Mueller et al

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1 Comment

Hello Paul,
Do you know any REAL specific cell surface marker for mesenchymal stem cells? There are a lot of known marker for these cells published (CD29, CD90, CD105….) but none is really specific, such as myosin heavy chain is specific for cardiomyocytes (dispite being intracellular, in this case).